I think I'm finally beginning to understand what the Many Worlders are talking about, in terms of quantum physics. I never thought I would come to agree with them - "universes" splitting off seemed rather fantastic, and I didn't ever think I'd see something that required it.

But now I think I understand enough to say that it seems to follow from taking Schrodinger's equation seriously.

In classical mechanics, the state of a system can be described as a vector in Hilbert space. In classical statistical mechanics, classical probability fields in hilbert space describe the possible particle ensembles of a system, but each vector evolves independently - there is no interaction in terms of classical laws.

In QM, amplitude fields are taken to be the fundamental state of the particle, and what a particle should "see" when it interacts with another particle is an amplitude field corresponding to it's state - each point of that field being what we think of as a "state" classically - and yet, in terms of the interaction forces, each vector in one particles field interacts with *all* the vectors of the other particle's field through the potential function.

Or you could stack the amplitude fields, and get one field describing all permutations of each particle's field states, with the interaction terms being the off diagonal stuff between them.


Is this even halfway right, or have I reached the point where I'm going mad like other poor students who study QM too long?

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